Students Renew S. Africa Protests

October 12, 1985|By R. Bruce Dold.

SOUTH BEND, IND. — Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame, strongly rejected the campaign for corporate divestment from South Africa during a campus rally Friday at which he called apartheid ``an evil and dehumanizing system.``

Five hundred Notre Dame students joined thousands of students in Chicago and across the nation in a day of protest against apartheid, showing that summer vacation did not dampen last spring`s wave of campus protests over racial separatism in South Africa.

Father Hesburgh, a nationally recognized civil rights leader, told students rallying under the university`s Golden Dome that ``the easiest answer of all is, `Divestment now.` ``

``If I was to say we would divest, we would all clap and cheer. But I don`t think it would be a very intelligent and moral decision,`` Father Hesburgh said. He was flanked by two black students symbolically muted with white bands across their mouths.

Later in an interview, Father Hesburgh said Columbia University had made an easy choice in its decision Monday to divest its South African-related holdings.

``What they essentially said was, it`s easier to do this than put up with all the student fuss,`` he said. ``I don`t think we should do something just to be popular.``

Father Hesburgh`s statements make him one of the most prominent civil rights activists in the country to object to the campaign to pressure U.S. companies and institutions to divest their holdings in South Africa.

A committee of university officials and students appointed in August is expected to make a recommendation later this month to the Notre Dame board of trustees on whether to change its policy, which allows investment in companies that follow guidelines toward promotion of racial equality in South Africa.

Father Hesburgh said he was not certain what portion of Notre Dame`s $306 million endowment was invested in such companies.

At the University of Chicago, about 400 students burned mock passbooks Friday to protest South African restrictions on travel by blacks and called for the school to divest its holdings in firms that do business in South Africa.

At Northwestern University, where 120 students were arrested last spring in antiapartheid demonstrations, students marchers Friday carried coffins and crosses. Later they called for the university to divest its holdings.

At the University of Illinois` Chicago campus, officials said Friday they have signed complaints against five students who allegedly disrupted a meeting of the board of trustees Thursday. The students have not been arrested but are expected to be charged with interference with a public institution of higher learning, a university spokesman said.

The demonstrations in South Bend and on Chicago-area campuses were echoed at dozens of schools across the country, including Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.; Harvard University; Iowa State University; and Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y.